When I turned 21, I moved to Montgomery, Alabama to join the Southern Poverty Law Center in its battle against the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis. I did not expect to face the same fight three decades later, or to find a President of the United States praising “very fine people on both sides.”

My work in Alabama, helping law-enforcement agencies bring hate groups to justice, remains among the most rewarding of my career. It fueled a lifelong passion for civil rights—a cause I later pursued at a state civil rights agency, where I designed and supervised an undercover investigation of employment discrimination.

I was inspired, then and now, by a leader I’d studied since childhood—a hero who’d sacrificed his life for the same cause two years after I was born.

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

This is a time of challenge and controversy—a time of terror and violence, when the forces of bigotry draw strength and comfort from the White House itself. But these threats will not vanish, and our struggle will not end, when Donald Trump leaves office.

Far more work lies ahead: to combat poverty, to close the racial wealth gap, to counter the effects of inequality and discrimination from banking and housing to employment and education, to create a justice system worthy of the title. Those tasks fall not only to the women and men we elect but to all of us.

We honor Dr. King today through marches and parades, on a holiday that bears his name. But we cannot rest until we fulfill his dream.

Andrew Romanoff